Gaunt, a little jaundiced, his hair greyer and sparser than when he was last seen in Moscow at his sentencing three years ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky stood defiantly in a Siberian courtroom on Wednesday despite being on the ninth day of a hunger strike.

He had been brought from a pre-trial detention centre in Chita, a city 6,500km east of Moscow, to a nearby court for a hearing relating to embezzlement charges brought against him last year.